Discovering Awesome Female Engineers in the GraphQL Community

Discovering Awesome Female Engineers in the GraphQL Community

An interesting use of our community-graph project and gender-API

A while back, I came across Peggy’s Twitter request:

Which got a really cool response from Bonnie that warmed my heart:

And triggered an idea …

Developer Community Activity Data

As you might know, we’re having a lot of fun showing the impressive engagement of developers in their communities (for example GraphQL, Neo4j, …​) in a single place by importing them into a “Community Graph.” Usually, it is really hard to follow the flurry of activity on Twitter, Slack, StackOverflow, GitHub, and so on to keep on top of whats happening. Especially if your community is growing quickly.

So we scratched an itch and are continuously importing (via AWS Lambda) the activity for the Neo4j community into a single graph, which can then be queried and visualized — and which is accessible here.

Let’s see if we can find one of the women (Bonnie Brennan) active in Peggy’s Twitter thread, who’s tweeting about GraphQL, and show her tweets and their tags.

We’re using Neo4j’s query language Cypher here, matching the ASCII-art pattern of “a user posting tweets tagged with these tags” and then binding the user’s screen_name to ‘bonnster75’ and returning everything we found.

Determining Gender

One simple way to predict gender is to look at the first name. I know that it is far from reliable, but we’re looking only for suggestions that we’ll check manually later. Then the power of the network can reveal further candidates.

I googled for “gender api” and found this site, which looked really nice and came with 500 free monthly requests and a simple HTTP API. Perfect for my late-night (3am) goal.

I tested a few of the names with that came back to Peggy’s request:Peggy, Bonnie, Belén, Robin, Danielle, and Morgan. Unfortunately, only a few got recommended to her, so I hoped that I could do better.

I used the interactive first name check at the gender-API homepage, which resulted in these results. I had to change the country to “US” as my default (“DE”) didn’t have the correct mapping for Robin and Morgan.

Now we want to find the “most active” women who tweet about GraphQL. A “score” could contain the number of tweets, and how often those tweets have been favorited, retweeted, or replied to. This is what we do here, we find users who have posted tweets, compute that score per user, and return the top 500 sorted by score.

Besides the funny (Ruby Inside, Else if), and the incorrectly classified (Jess,Brooke), we get a number of active women in the GraphQL community that were not recommended before:ladyleet, _KarimaTounsya, thekamahele, lauralindal, thelamkin, eveporcello and several more.

I manually went over the screen-names, looked at these twitter profiles, and set a check-mark √ for female accounts and an ! for new names.

We found 22 women in total — which is of course not a lot if you look at the absolute number of people tweeting about GraphQL, but it is a start and hopefully growing quickly.

Now that we have our list, let’s put it to good use! Be sure to check out the work of these talented and active women and follow them on Twitter if you aren’t already. By recognizing their contributions, we can hopefully inspire more women to be active members of the GraphQL community and discover more names for our list in the future.

PS: We heard from Nikolas, the curator of @graphqlweekly, that our “this week in GraphQL” overview page helped them a lot in compiling the weekly newsletter. It also features a “Twitter Active” tab, which should help you to find people to follow, too.

We’re also happy to offer the community graph service to other communities, so feel free to reach out to us via [email protected], if you’re interested.

PPS: Thanks so much to Peggy Rayzis who started this engaging activity, provided very valuable feedback for this post, and gave her permission for publication. Make sure to follow her on Twitter and here on Medium.

Our mission: to help people learn to code for free. We accomplish this by creating thousands of
videos, articles, and interactive coding lessons - all freely available to the public. We also have
thousands of freeCodeCamp study groups around the world.